General SolidWorks News

Yes sir! No sir! Not that kind of General SolidWorks. Just SolidWorks, generally. You know what I mean. Still, I can’t guarantee that you won’t get fired for reading this, so proceed at your own risk.

Anyway, it has been a while since I posted anything here, and lots of things are happening. Still its summer, so you can excuse me for slacking a bit.

Dassault releases a 2D product?

Yeah, and honestly, who cares? It’s just more in the nasty war between DS and Autodesk. Give away what the other guy sells. Like Microsoft did so long ago. If you really need a 2D tool, check out Dassault’s giveaway product, DraftSight. What does it mean for the former DWG Editor, now known as the SolidWorks 2D editor from Intellicad? Well, who knows, and again, who cares.

If you want to find out more about this, go to Deelip’s blog on the topic. I believe that Deelip comes to the wrong conclusion. DS is not really getting into the 2D market, they are just trying to cut the financial legs out from under Autodesk, and gain access to real 2D users. It’s telling that this product announcement comes not so long after the settlement of the lawsuit over the DWG file type name resulting in SW agreeing to rename the DWG Editor to SolidWorks 2D Editor. That’s really a bit of a misleading name, because the SolidWorks 2D Editor doesn’t edit SolidWorks 2D data at all, only AutoCAD 2D data. Why these infantile companies cannot simply compete on technical merits I will never understand. Playing silly name games only benefits the lawyers, not the users.

SolidWorks 2011 Beta

So how many people haven’t installed 2010 yet? Is a constant onslaught of half-baked new stuff you don’t need really need the best way for SolidWorks to make more money? I rather doubt it, but that’s the way they have chosen. Still, 2011 beta is going to hit on or about July 6, and I’ll be there out of curiosity if  for no other reason. There are new contests, with fabulous prizes. The only prize I hope for is for bugs to not reach sp0, as unrealistic as that sounds.

Service Pack 4.0 released

This is bigger news than it sounds. If you check out the release notes, there are tons of bug fixes in sp4. Several pertained directly to some of my customers.

Head in the clouds

I was working in my cloud-based blog software, WordPress, the other day, when notice of a new version came down. I suddenly realized that one of the main selling points that CAD in the cloud proponents are touting is probably a sham. One particular claim is that on the cloud, there are no versions, you are simply running whatever software is installed on the cloud that particular day. Just like Facebook.

But what about WordPress? WordPress is not as big as Facebook, but it is certainly one of the most widely used web apps for maintaining blogs. This blog is written using WordPress. The thing is that a lot of independent developers develop plugins for WordPress, stuff like things that allow readers to upload files, or provide statistics or filter out spam, and their software may only be compatible with certain versions of WordPress. When you update WordPress, sometimes you have to update the plugin as well. And, guess what? WordPress does not update itself. You have to initiate it, and it certainly matters what version you are running on. And Facebook? Facebook is a rather loose ship, and I’m sure it matters every bit as much to applications that run within Facebook which version it is running with, but they try to keep this transparent to the user. And apps that run with Facebook aren’t exactly well known for quality and stability, which may be in part due to version incompatibilities.

So if I run WordPress on the cloud, what’s the big deal? Well, first, I have direct access to the files on the server because I own the domain. I don’t maintain the hardware, but I do maintain the software and through FTP I can add and remove files directly. The direct control makes all the difference. If I could host my own SolidWorks in the cloud, and the cloud could be on my domain or on a local server right in my office and only served across the network, that would be a value to me. But on someone else’s server across the internet? I don’t have any need for that, and doubt strongly that many people actually do. The people who are the biggest advocates of this are people who have something to sell, not actual users.

I do believe that some people will be willing to pay for the SW on someone else’s cloud, but it will not be the majority of users. And the reason for this has little to do with age. Some folks claim that anyone who disagrees with them is just an old fart. Which is strange, since old farts are the ones who remember previous attempts to push paying customers to take delivery of CAD software over the internet. Plus, I’m not really that old. And even if I am past the age where I’m able to accept the cloud, why do I blog on the cloud, and bank on the cloud when possible?

I think there is a real difference between blogs and banks and CAD. The blog is all about getting information out there, and being seen. That’s why its on the web. The bank, well, the bank’s data belongs to the bank. And whether I access it or not, it’s already available. So I might as well benefit from it.

But CAD data, well, it’s just so big. And it takes so long to compute. And, quite frankly, unless I am sharing data (which I generally do not) there is not even any reason for me to have the data on my local network, much less someone else’s network. I’ve long been a proponent of solving problems with the least possible complexity. Anyone who thinks the internet is less complex than a local computer or even a local network is simply not being honest with anyone. So my beef against CAD in the cloud is the complexity of the solution, and the lack of alternatives if something goes wrong. Not my age.

Update update

This should be a separate post, but I don’t want to give this that much exposure, so it’s just tacked on here at the end of the cad in the cloud. Anyway, Spatial, the folks who bring you the ACIS geometry kernel, are now offering a really simplistic CAD viewer. (gotta use IE7/32) It does slightly more than just view, you can also remove faces and add fillets. I suppose these tools have been added to prove the actual geometry kernel is being run across the web, to distinguish it from a straight viewer. Is it more than just a toy? Not right now, but you can be sure this is not all that is coming. You can also be sure that a viewer is a long way from a real CAD tool.

If you want to read more about it, and from someone who is more impressed with it than I am, again, go to Deelip’s blog.

The timing of an announcement like this seems lined up to take some of the punch out of the Synchronous Technology 3 announcements coming from the Siemens PLM event.

The new Spatial offering will allow developers to license the Catia V6 geometry kernel as well as the cloud tools to develop 3D cloud  applications for end users. It seems uncharacteristic for Catia to license anything at all, but now that SolidWorks is getting a V6 make over, they might as well let the rest of the world do it too. but I think the really important thing here is that they are licensing their cloud tools. If the customers are (D)assaulted on all sides with cad in the cloud from many different vendors, they may be more likely to succumb. Or a rising tide floats all ships. However you want to look at it. They are trying to make some money off of other vendors who think they can sell cad in the cloud.

I’m sure the Really Big CAD companies hear the protests from users, and they are developing this stuff anyway. So far Solid Edge seems to be the one that is not getting caught up in it. I guess they have enough to worry about with sorting out the last band wagon they jumped on.